Front Page30 Mar 2009 04:06 pm
Front Page27 Mar 2009 04:06 pm
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The MakerBot CupCake 3D Printer. $750, and comes with five pounds of plastic. Yow.
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Cheap, autonomous flying aircraft. Nifty!
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Capacitance sensing, the brute force method.
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A simple variable voltage power supply.
Front Page27 Mar 2009 01:16 pm
Gangster Gadget makes awesome and reasonably priced protoboards to assist in making electronic projects. They’re through-hole plated, high quality boards, and fun to hack on.
They’ve just released a new board they call their Boss Board. It has spots for a PS2 connector, Audio/Video jacks, and even an NES controller (where do you get the connectors??).
The more I get into etching my own PCBs, the more I see the value in pushing out a project quickly with a protoboard. It doesn’t look as nice, but it’s just a LOT easier.
Front Page25 Mar 2009 09:59 pm
Avery 8317 Embossed Note Cards Template
In producing our wedding thank you letters, I found I needed a template for Avery’s “Embossed Note Cards.” I couldn’t find any online, so I made my own.
8317 Embossed Note Card Template for Photoshop (PSD)
Front Page24 Mar 2009 05:48 pm
I couldn’t have asked for a more perfect wedding, to a more perfect girl.
Front Page& Projects24 Mar 2009 05:25 pm
Here’s how to grab a single frame from a live video stream using GStreamer on Linux in Ruby.
The trick is to use the “last_buffer” property on your video sink. That contains the last frame that was displayed to your screen.
You can use RMagick to convert that into something you can use like this:
#!/usr/bin/ruby
require 'gst'
require 'RMagick'
@pipe = Gst::Pipeline.new
@source = Gst::ElementFactory.make("v4l2src")
@sink = Gst::ElementFactory.make("xvimagesink")
@pipe.add(@source,@sink)
@source >> @sink
@pipe.play
[ ... Later ... ]
# This is the actual capture.
capture = Image.from_blob(@sink.last_buffer.data).first
Front Page17 Feb 2009 04:11 pm
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The chemistry basics of biology
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Basic Cloning and Biobrick Assembly Tutorial.
Front Page13 Feb 2009 04:05 pm
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Confetti made of the same stuff as cornstarch packing peanuts.
Front Page06 Feb 2009 04:06 pm
Front Page05 Feb 2009 04:07 pm
Front Page27 Jan 2009 04:08 pm
System Admin26 Jan 2009 12:31 pm
A SOAP kstat server for Solaris
I’m learning Ruby, and as an early project, I thought I’d write a little SOAP server for exposing Solaris “kstat” output to the network.
It’s embryonic, but it works. I’d like to do a little more input sanitation, since it’s certainly possible to really hurt your server by requesting a kstat value of “::” (which returns all stats).
Here’s the server code:
require 'soap/rpc/standaloneServer'
class StatServ < SOAP::RPC::StandaloneServer
def initialize(*args)
super
add_method(self, 'kstat', 'stat')
end
def kstat(stat)
stat.gsub!(/[^a-zA-z0-9_:+]/i,'%');
f = IO.popen("kstat -p #{stat}")
return f.readlines
end
end
server = StatServ.new('StatServ,'urn:StatServ','0.0.0.0',8888)
trap('INT') { server.shutdown ; puts "Server shutdown."}
trap('TERM') { server.shutdown ; puts "Server shutdown."}
puts "Starting server..."
server.start
…and the client code:
require 'soap/rpc/driver'
def usage
puts "Usage: #{$0} hostname kstatvalue"
puts " Retrieves a kstat value from a remote machine's StatServ SOAP Server."
end
hostname = ARGV[0]
value = ARGV[1];
if ! value
usage;
exit 1;
end
driver = SOAP::RPC::Driver.new("http://#{hostname}:8888/", 'urn:StatServ')
driver.add_method('kstat', 'stat')
val = driver.kstat("#{value}")
val.each do |s|
puts "#{s}"
end
Front Page04 Jan 2009 11:59 pm
Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-01-04
- First day at work in a week. It’s like I just got back from a vacation. #
- Need new year’s party! #
- Where are the good parties in Portland this New Year? #
- Sounds like Backspace/Ground Kontrol will be fun, as does Someday Lounge, and Saucebox has DJ Mr. Mumu and DJ The Perfect Syn. What else? #
- The portland indoor smoking ban is now in effect! Wish it were before my clothes got saturated with smoke. #
- Eating pho and watching Shogun. #
- Another night of Pho and Shogun! My life rocks! #
- Mmm.. Wiibrew. #
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Electronics& Front Page13 May 2008 06:16 pm
For dorkbotpdx last night, I made this little toy:
It’s an 8×8 red+green LED Matrix, driven by three shift registers driven by a Bare Bones Board Freeduino by Modern Device Company.
Before the meeting I just had it flashing fun patterns based on odd bit-math equations. During the meeting, I was urged to add some code to make it controllable by the Wii Nunchuk. So, I wrote a simple program that takes the X and Y of accelerometer and plots it on the matrix.
I drove the LED Matrix with three shift registers: One 74HC595 8-bit register gave power to the rows of the display, and one Maxim-IC MAX6969 sank current for the columns to the display. To turn on row 1, column one, you shift “B10000000″ into the row register, and “B10000000″ into the column register:
1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 x o o o o o o o 0 o o o o o o o o 0 o o o o o o o o 0 o o o o o o o o 0 o o o o o o o o 0 o o o o o o o o 0 o o o o o o o o 0 o o o o o o o o
Altogether, it was about 30 lines of code to drive the matrix with some fun patterns.
